Regular programming of GALLERYPLATFORM.LA has been suspended this week in support of Black Lives Matter as we turn attention towards amplifying the voices of our local community leaders, activists, and artists during this time. Please join us in support of The Crenshaw Dairy Mart following our support for The Underground Museum and Lauren Halsey's Summaeverythang Community Center. This will then be sustained into a long-term initiative to share community-driven projects on the website.

Just south of Manchester and off of Crenshaw stands tall a former dairy mart, home to an artist collective and art gallery dedicated to shifting the trauma-induced conditions of poverty and economic injustice, bridging cultural work and advocacy, and investigating ancestries through the lens of Inglewood and its community.

What these Black and transnational identities seek is an imagination of new collective memory through programming, events, and arts installations which cultivate and nurture communal arts and education.

Founded by artists Patrisse Cullors, Alexandre Dorriz, and noé olivas, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart emerges from an investment in abolition, modes of accessibility in art practice, and weaving community through solidarity and new memories.

Donations to the Crenshaw Dairy Mart are tax-deductible through their fiscal sponsor Fractured Atlas.

CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic is an online exhibition that centers fourteen artworks produced by six currently incarcerated artists. All but three of the artworks exhibited on GALLERYPLATFORM.LA were specifically made in response to the global pandemic that, as of June 23rd, at least 48,764 incarcerated individuals have tested positive for. In naming the disproportionate effects on the incarcerated community, this exhibition seeks to highlight a community’s recorded responses to this moment, ensuring their narratives surrounding this pandemic are public, forthright, and asserted on view.

We say Care Not Cages because all forms of incarceration, detention, and imprisonment are a spatial violation of the right to live, and at every instance, a form of torture. In the words of Patrisse Cullors, artist, abolitionist, and co-founder of Black Lives Matter and the Crenshaw Dairy Mart, we are calling for a world that prioritizes abolition. By reimaging care and dignity, we are envisioning a world that benefits all of us, not just the few. A world that denounces cages.

Care Not Cages is a call to action.

In late April of this year, the Crenshaw Dairy Mart released a statement in protest to the pandemic that is racial capitalism, and announced an artist relief fund through an open call, entitled Care Not Cages, juried alongside Californians United for a Responsible Budget (CURB), Justice LA, and For Freedoms. Three awards were distributed, and ten submissions by currently incarcerated artists were received, all of whom were also awarded relief funds. Six of those ten artists' works are being exhibited and sold here as prints. All proceeds from sales of prints in CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic will go directly to books or immediate family of the currently incarcerated artists. The pool of sales will be equitably split between the ten aforementioned currently incarcerated artists.

Participating artists include Ras Allen, Mesro the Human Sun, Ronell Draper, Miguel Flores AKA Smoke, Orlando Smith, and Larry White, all of whom have consented to the exhibition and sale of their works online. For more information on each artist, please click on their respective artworks below. The Crenshaw Dairy Mart will continue its commitment to abolition, ancestry, and healing, in pandemic, in Uprising, in unrest.

CARE NOT CAGES: Processing a Pandemic is curated by Ana Briz, independent researcher, writer, and curator, and Alexandre Dorriz, artist, writer, and co-founder of the Crenshaw Dairy Mart.

The Crenshaw Dairy Mart is a fiscally sponsored project by Fractured Atlas. ALL SUPPORT TO THE CRENSHAW DAIRY MART IS 100% TAX-DEDUCTIBLE THROUGH OUR FISCAL SPONSOR, FRACTURED ATLAS